All to often we see players who are putting armor on their characters that is completely wrong for their class. For example I have seen warriors running around with plate armor on that is designed for Paladins. This means that they are wearing armor with stats that are focused on intellect and spirit which is designed to help regenerate mana.

The arguement that I get from these people is that they love the spirit for the regeneration ability, but the fact is that their characters traits are designed to perform best with Strength and Stamina as their main stats. The more of each of these the better. Which one you use as your main stat is determined by your spec.

One thing you need to understand about stats is that they affect each class in World of Warcraft differently. This means that what helps a warrior will not help a hunter or a mage. This is because each stat adds additional bonuses depending upon which class you are playing. So for example strength gives warriors additional parry and block ability in conjunction with attack power. However, on a hunter this would not be true since their main stat is agility which gives them additional attack power, critical strike and dodge abilities. Strength would only affect their melee stats and since hunters are a ranged attack class this would not be beneficial to them.

So lets look at each of the specializations available to warriors to better understand what you should be looking for so that you can better gear them for their spec.

Protection Warriors: The main stat you should be concerned with is stamina. The more of this the better. Your character is not designed to do damage in this spec, but rather to take it and hold the attention of the mobs around you so that your teammates can kill them.
In addition to stamina if you are looking for enchants you would concern yourself with defense rating as well. Protection speced warriors want to have a high defensive rating as well as stamina. This allows for long survival times in battle and combined with a good healer it could be a very, very long time.

Arms Warriors: Your main stat that you will be looking for is going to be strength then followed closely by stamina. With arms warriors your attacks are slow, but huge with each hit especially when you receive a critical strike which can run upwards of 7,000 or more at level 70. This means that the more power you bring to the table when you receive these critical strikes the higher that all important huge hit will be. Your enchants should focus on strength which will increase your abilities even further and attack power. There are a few other enchants to weapons and such that will help you in additional ways such as Savagery which adds 70 attack power to a two-handed weapon and is extremely beneficial to an arms warrior as well. Hint: boost your attack power as high as you can.

Fury Warriors: Fury warriors are similar in setup to arms warriors with a minor difference. When you go for enchants focus almost strictly on attack power. I know, I know you hear this tactic is wrong and that you should focus on getting your critical strike rating higher. However, focusing on critical strike rating is not really true. Fury warriors are designed for dps. They deal alot of it quickly and although their crits are not nearly as high as an arms warrior their dps they deal is much higher over the same amount of time. My own fury warrior runs with a 28% crit chance and attack power of 1600 and that is with not even close to a complete set of season 1 arena gear. When dealing with other classes their health drops so fast and with enchants suchs as mongoose on your weapons you can actually score 3 crits off your duel weild weapons and possiblely 4 if mongoose is on both. This means that if you are able to crit for 2.5 to 3k you would multiply this by 3 or 4 times if your mongoose procs on both weapons and you score a crit on each. That would be up to 12 thousand in damage and would kill most opponents immediately. I have had this happen. Even if this does not happen for you the amount of white damage will eventually overwhelm them.

So why is attack power more important then crit overall? This is because white damage will 9 times out of 10 win a fight for you unless your opponent scores alot of critical strikes. If you were to focus on crit instead of attack power yes you could make your crit percentage higher, but the fact is that your crit chances are still much lower and the reduced attack power because of your focus on crit is going to affect you more adversely.

If you have a crit percentage lets say of 31% and attack power of 1400 because of your focus on this stat and your opponents focus is on attack power his stats are 28% crit and 1600 attack power who do you think will win most of the time? The person whose focus is on his attack power will win most of the time with all things considered equal. The difference will be the strength and number of crits that each one is delivering. Now while you would be able to deliver 3% more crits than your opponent would his crits due to his attack power strength would be much stronger then yours. In addition this small percentage difference in crit is not enough to make a difference normally. Given a choice between strong white hits which equals more dps and a 3% higher chance of receiving a crit I will take the attack power.

Any class is about out lasting your opponent. If you can do this successfully you will win and have a more enjoyable time.